Recent Fiction
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Literature is full of misfits and so-called social outcasts, though it is often the outcast, and not society, who makes the break. In even the most dubious of the short fictions collected in “The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios” (Harcourt, 192 pages, $23), Yann Martel parades the quirkiness that made his “Life of Pi” a bestseller. I say dubious because these short stories are from the earliest days of Mr. Martel’s career; they are published in the United States only to capitalize on the success of “The Life of Pi,” which described a godly young man’s 227-day journey adrift on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger.
The bulk of this slim volume is taken up by the title story, which, like Mr. artel’s famous Bildungsroman, takes the form of a log. A man drops out of college to comfort a friend who is dying of AIDS. To pass the long days of bed sitting, they tell the oral history of the fictional Roccamatios family of Helsinki. We get a glimpse of young Mr. Martel’s creative concerns: “If our story was to have any stamina, any breadth and depth, if it was to avoid both literal reality and irrelevant fantasy, it would need a structure, a guideline of sorts, some curb along which we blind could tap our white canes.” Apparently “breadth and depth” is a single quantity.
They move through the history of the 20th century, selecting a historical factoid to serve as a “metaphorical guideline” for the week’s story; thus Mr. Martel occupies much of his novella with encyclopedia entries. In 1901 Queen Victoria dies, and in the first chapter of their story the Roccamatio patriarch dies. But Mr. Martel often neglects the Roccamatios to tell the story of young Paul’s decline.
Mr. Martel has successfully marketed a brand of optimism that is safely modest. That modesty is rarely suitable, however, to the life and death situations Mr. Martel prefers to dramatize.
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After heart surgery in 1991, Larry McMurtry felt no longer himself, as he documented in “Roads,” a travelogue in which Mr. McMurtry went in search of himself. That search is reheeled and fictionalized in “Loop Group” (Simon & Schuster, 242 pages, $25).
Maggie, a scrappy Hollywood sexagenarian who runs a loop group, or group that provides ambient whoops and moans for B-movie soundtracks, has recently had a hysterectomy. Her three daughters attempt an intervention; Maggie persuades her girlfriend Connie to take a trip to Texas.
Mr. McMurtry’s latest effort is, in terms of ambition, not much above the level of a buddy movie. Maggie and Connie maintain the sex life of 20-somethings; as women of independent views but not independent means, their daily survival would be fine sitcom material.
As his novel closes, however, Mr. Mc-Murtry lets Maggie’s post hysterectomy malaise mature. Maggie enters into a Boston marriage with Connie. But their friendship has changed. Connie is still sexually active: “Connie had managed to keep a willingness or openness or something – a quality that Maggie could no longer summon the slightest iota of.” It is an elegant set of variations: Maggie’s character, caught as it is in a zany, gift-shop world, changes only as subtly as a very real person’s.
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A more complicated habit of turning away from the world is described in Dorothy Nelson’s “Tar and Feathers” (Dalkey Archive, 133 pages, $12.50). Little known outside of Ireland, Ms. Nelson’s novel of 1987 is now published in the U.S. It shows a large and rewarding storytelling skill. In the tradition of modern Irish literature, Ms. Nelson gives each character their own, deeply unreliable monologues.
Da, a sometime flasher, says “I wish I could pack my bags and leave myself behind.” At other times, “His need to chat was pressing in on him, becoming sharp as a toothache.” Da is the demented father bear of a very troubled Irish family. While he goes in and out of prison, his wife takes up drinking and flirts with their son, Ben, who both claims that “I love tragedy” and “I want to kiss everyone but a boy can’t, he can only say, ‘Hallo how’s things?'”
Da is a truly original character, a manic-depressive capable of rich idiosyncrasy. For example, he likes prison: “I had no worries. I had no money. Money’s a curse. You have a little more than the next man and he wants to cut your throat. Here we were all equal. … [The guards] had to take sleeping pills to help them sleep. I slept like a newborn babe.”
Ms. Nelson’s subject matter is almost tediously dark: incest, wife-battering. But her writing demands attention. Desperately perceptive, Ben is the wise but still-failing soul of Ms. Nelson’s book: “So I kept my dreams to myself while Mam made a big bonfire out of hers and danced around them in a fit of rage.” Talents as over serious as Ms. Nelson’s are not always taken seriously; it is a shame.